In the last few days, MythTV has several times spontaneously stuttered to a halt while using it. Getting 1 frame/10 seconds playback; unable to do anything other than ping the box (no SSH, for example). Very hesitant mouse motion. And the hard drive going flat out.
The first couple of times I just rebooted, but the last time, I left SSH open to the box with top running until it happened. mtd was using 90% of the memory and was the only thing showing positive CPU usage. When I killed it, the box resumed working.
I then rebooted, fired up top and watched as its memory usage continually went up. It was in the 1.5G range when I was looking at it.
There are two things I suspect might be involved: a software update, or settings change. I have been trying to get remote front ends working (without success; but that's a different email). But I really haven't changed settings for anything but mysql on the back end.
I saw a post that suggested this can happen if something goes wrong and the backend is continually writing to its log, but this doesn't appear to be the case. Certainly, right before I rebooted the last time, there isn't a huge amount of activity. The current log is less than a megabyte, and none are less than 4. (None of the /var/log/mythtv/* are particularly big).
I've also noticed movie playback going in and out of voice sync and stuttering a little, but that doesn't appear to be mtd related (it was happening with mtd shut down).
I'm running the latest everything (at time of writing) except I haven't updated to Koala (after hearing reports of instability). It's a fast box with 2GB RAM and a 1TB drive with about 100GB free.
Help? :-)